If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

“For much of their lives, Eleanor Royden had acquiesced in her husband’s delusions of grandeur. She let him have his own way. Sometimes that’s the easiest way to keep peace with a tyrant, but in the end it costs you, because tyrants feed on people who let them have their own way all the time. They take it for granted.

“Imagine Jeb’s surprise when he wanted a new toy, and insignificant old Eleanor said no. He had the palatial house in Chambord Oaks, and the midlife sports car, and all the money he needed, and now he wanted the trophy: a new young wife- the hormonal equivalent of a face-lift, I guess. And Eleanor said no.

“How dared she? Wasn’t he the rich and important attorney? Didn’t he deserve the best of everything? He could certainly afford it. Eleanor had tried to thwart the mighty Jeb Royden, and he thought she deserved to be punished for it.

“His indifference toward an aging and no-longer-beautiful wife turned to hatred for an enemy. He began to use his legal skills, his power and influence, as weapons to turn his divorce into a chess game. He would make Eleanor suffer for her presumption. The tragedy is that he began to enjoy tormenting her.

“Jeb Royden forgot that it is dangerous to torment the weak. They have nothing to lose.” A. P. Hill noticed a movement in the back of the crowded courtroom. She saw her partner slip into the last row of seats. A. P. Hill felt ridiculously glad to see him. He had driven all the way up from Danville just to give her moral support. No one could help her now, but she was grateful to see someone who was on her side. She couldn’t smile at Bill now; she would thank him later.

A. P. Hill turned away and picked up where she had left off: “You’ve been told in detail all the things that were done to punish Eleanor Royden for the sin of not going away quietly. She was arrested for trespassing; the furniture she had chosen for their home was given away so that she should have none of it; she was ridiculed in front of her former friends, and made to live in poverty by a man with a high-six-figure income, while he continued to live in his usual splendor. And through it all Jeb and Staci Royden laughed at Eleanor. They made fun of her. You saw a check he wrote her, on which he put: for upkeep of cow. That cow was Jeb Royden’s wife of twenty years, the woman he had promised to love for better or for worse.

“Then there was Staci Royden, Jeb’s little Giselle. Eleanor had a host of other names for her replacement. Can you blame her? Staci Royden knew that her prospective suitor was married from the moment she met him. She didn’t particularly care. Jeb was rich, and Staci was young and beautiful. And Eleanor didn’t matter.

“Our society seems to say that to people, through our advertising, our television shows, the attitudes of public figures-they all say: ‘Rich people, young people, pretty people matter. The rest of you don’t.’

“Eleanor Royden thought that she mattered. Perhaps a wiser woman would have been content to wait for Staci to grow old and learn the unhappy truth about youth and beauty not lasting forever, but I think Eleanor’s pain was too great for wisdom. She isn’t much given to introspection, anyhow. She is shallow. Could anyone who wasn’t shallow have loved Jeb Royden? I don’t think so.

“Eleanor is not without pride, though. And there was a limit to her endurance. Jeb and Staci taunted Eleanor for a couple of years, and finally she decided that it had to end. You know what she did then. She took her pistol, and she went to Jeb’s fine mansion, and she put an end to the torment. You believe that she shot Jeb and Staci. I believe it. But you know who doesn’t believe it, not really, deep down?”

A. P. Hill pointed to her client, who was no longer smiling. “She doesn’t believe it! Eleanor Royden cannot comprehend what she has done, because it is still incredible to her that someone as almighty as Jeb could be stopped by a nickel’s worth of lead. She still talks about him in the present tense, ladies and gentlemen. Now, you may think that it is insane to shoot someone, and then refuse to believe that they are dead. It certainly suggests that no intent to kill was there.

“Jeb and Staci made sport of Eleanor-and you know which sport it was? Bearbaiting. It’s an old, barbaric custom that we’ve done away with as far as bears are concerned; sometimes our next of kin are less fortunate. The way it worked: people chained a bear to a wooden stake, and they let dogs loose to attack it, forcing the bear to fight back. Usually the bear was hurt or killed, but often it managed to dispatch some of the attacking dogs before it died. That’s what the Royden case reminds me of, ladies and gentlemen. A poor trapped creature who could not defend herself against a rich and powerful ex-spouse was baited and teased and ridiculed until she snapped. And she fought back.

“Don’t use this tale as a parable of divorce. Most people are not Jeb and Staci and Eleanor. But this one time, two cruel and brutal people underestimated the rage of their victim, and she struck back, with fatal results. Whether they drove her insane, or whether she was acting in self-defense from the emotional abuse, the fact remains: Eleanor Royden did not commit murder in cold blood, and she should not be made to suffer further. The bear is still tied to the stake, but it has managed to defeat the dogs. Can we not call a halt to the sport now, and let her go in peace?”

The rest of the trial was something of a blur to A. P. Hill, who tended to develop stage fright after a performance rather than before. Dimly, she heard the prosecution’s argument, and she made herself watch the jury as they filed out to begin their deliberations. Then she went back to the ladies’ room, and was sick.

Eleanor Royden was returned to the cell to await the verdict, and A. P. Hill hung around the courthouse, pacing and wishing she smoked, for as long as she could stand it. Finally, Bill MacPherson lured her back to the Marriott with take-out hamburgers, after first securing promises from everywhere that they would be notified the moment any word came from the jury room. “We’re only five miles away,” he told her. “You could get there in less than ten minutes if you drove like a madwoman. Which you would.”

“I keep wondering if there was something else I should have said,” A. P. Hill said. She had kicked off her sensible shoes and was sitting curled up in an easy chair, watching hamburger grease congeal on the waxed paper in front of her. It was past seven o’clock now, and outside the light was fading, but A. P. Hill neither noticed nor cared.

“You gave a good speech,” said Bill. “Maybe better than your client deserved. I’m not sure I approve of sympathy for people who execute those who annoy them.”

A. P. Hill nodded. “You wonder how married people can become such strangers. I can’t imagine hating anyone enough to want them dead. But, then, I wouldn’t choose someone like Jeb Royden for a husband, either.”

“No?” said Bill between french fries. “I thought you liked brilliant, powerful people.”

His partner considered it. “I admire people like that, yes. They might be wearing on a daily basis, though.” She thought about all the bright high achievers she had known in law school. Some of them were even more ruthless than she was, and in partnership together they might have become fast-track legal piranhas, but instead she had chosen- proposed it herself, actually-to practice law in a small Virginia town with good old Bill MacPherson. He would probably never argue a case before the Supreme Court, but he brought her hamburgers and sat with her while she sweated out a verdict. A. P. Hill decided that she had made the right choice-at least for now.

“I can’t imagine you ever being a battered woman,” Bill was saying.

A. P. Hill looked appraisingly at her law partner. “No,” she said. “I don’t suppose I will be.”

They had finished eating, and Bill was reading the room-service menu in hopes of persuading Powell to join him for coffee and dessert when the phone rang. She sprang past him and snatched up the receiver. “Yes? They’re coming in? Of course. Give me ten minutes.”

Bill stood up. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“No. I have to do this alone.”

He could see that it would be useless to argue with her. “You’ll come back, won’t you?”

She almost smiled. “It’s my room, Bill.”

“Well… I hope it goes well. Good luck, partner.”

“I’ll need it,” said A. P. Hill, closing the door gently behind her.

Bill decided that pacing the floor waiting for Powell to return would be a waste of energy. She was doing enough worrying on her own. He had never seen her so emotional. Privately, he thought that it was lucky the case was ending, regardless of the verdict, because A. P. Hill’s nerves wouldn’t stand much more of the Eleanor Royden circus. She must have lost ten pounds at least, and she didn’t have them to spare. He glanced at the half a hamburger Powell had left uneaten. Things had to get back to normal soon. Bill resolved to pour the bottles of pink medicine down the sink as soon as he got back to the office by way of celebrating the end of the ordeal.

Meanwhile, he called room service and settled back on the king-size bed to play remote-control roulette while he waited. He caught the last half of a Star Trek rerun, and was flipping desultorily back and forth between CNN, the Home Shopping Network, and Unsolved Mysteries, when he heard a soft tapping at the door. “Powell?” he called out.